[gl-como] Fwd: Re: Summary of the ARM ports BoF at DC15

[Elena ``of Valhalla'']

Ciao

informazioni rilevanti per le schede Olimex

----- Forwarded message from Karsten Merker <merker@debian.org> -----

Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2015 20:13:01 +0200
From: Karsten Merker <merker@debian.org>
To: debian-arm@lists.debian.org
Subject: Re: Summary of the ARM ports BoF at DC15
Message-ID: <20150911181300.GA7297@excalibur.cnev.de>

On Fri, Sep 11, 2015 at 04:58:42PM +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote:

> As promised, here's a quick summary of what was discussed at the BoF
> session in Heidelberg.
[...]
> armhf
> =====
[...]
> Question about Oluxino boards and making them work - currently needs
> modifying u-boot. Talk to Karsten Merker - he's the export on this!
> :-)

Hello,

I would like to add a small correction/addition here: the
Olinuxinos generally work quite well, the issue was about adding
support for setups that use LCDs on the "special" LCD connectors
of those boards, i.e. displays that are connected directly via
LVDS/DSI/RGB parallel interfaces and not via HDMI/VGA.

These setups currently require build-time changes in u-boot which
are both board- and panel-dependent, i.e. one needs a different
u-boot build for each possible combination of board and panel
type, which would lead to an exploding number of u-boot builds. 
The same problem exists for other boards as well, e.g. for the
BananaPi and the BananaPro.

This gets additionally complicated by the fact that many of those
panels are touch-sensitive and come with a wide variety of
different touch-screen controllers, which would require different
device-trees for the kernel depending on the panel model.

We have been discussing the issue with u-boot upstream but have
not yet come to a short-term workable solution.  On the kernel
side, things are progressing, albeit slowly.  Kernel upstream is
working on a generic framework for device-tree overlays, which
would allow us to provide overlay files for specific
configuration variants that could be loaded in addition to a
"base" device-tree for the board, instead of having to build full
device-trees for every possible combination of hardware. 
Developments in this area will be discussed at the upcoming
Embedded Linux Conference Europe next month
(http://lceeu2015.sched.org/event/999c45c7fe78824a88269f35539c7e5c).

Mainline u-boot is currently in the process of slowly converting
a large number of drivers and boards to the new driver model,
which allows deriving platform configuration from device-trees.
Whether and how it might be possible to adapt the kernel
overlay model for u-boot as well is still open; work on
u-boot in that area depends on the kernel side being settled
first.

Regards,
Karsten
-- 
Gem. Par. 28 Abs. 4 Bundesdatenschutzgesetz widerspreche ich der Nutzung
sowie der Weitergabe meiner personenbezogenen Daten für Zwecke der
Werbung sowie der Markt- oder Meinungsforschung.


----- End forwarded message -----

-- 
Elena ``of Valhalla''